Reviews by Matt

The end of August is a black hole for movies. The summer movies have all been released and the movies with hopes of Oscar nominations are still a few weeks away. Most of the movies here are forgettable and are released for the sake of being released. It is a horrible time to be a moviegoer.

Bring on “Balls of Fury.” Former child pingpong prodigy Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) has fallen far since he made a fool of himself at the 1988 Olympics. He is stuck doing variety shows in a Reno restaurant. The FBI asks him to compete in an underground pingpong tournament with the best players in the world being hosted by Feng (Christopher Walken). Feng is a known evildoer (no idea exactly what he does) and the FBI wants to know what Feng is up to. Randy has not competed in many years and is not ready. He goes to see Master Wong (James Hong) and his sexy pingpong playing niece Maggie Wong (Maggie Q) to get him ready to take on the best Feng can throw at him.

“Balls of Fury” is an unfunny version of “Dodgeball.” With the exception of Christopher Walken and two or three lines from Diedrich Bader (of “The Drew Carey Show” fame), there is nothing funny about this movie. It tries so hard to be funny and smart, but just ends up stupid and sad. This is all compounded by the “Matrix-type” camera shots of the pingpong games. The action stops with the ball in mid-air as one player is about to hit the ball and then the camera rotates to the opposing player. Gee, that has not been used in every movie since “The Matrix.” Use all the fancy camera tricks you want, there is no way to make pingpong cinematically interesting.

The main characters are so unfunny and so uninteresting you just cannot care about them. Randy is just another in a long line of fat, stupid slacker types. Maggie Q plays the generic attractive woman who is tougher than the hero and falls in love with him despite the fact that he is a moron. All has been done before and done better.

The only saving grace is Walken. He is funny without even trying to be. He has adapted this strange and quirky persona and run with it in most of the movies he has done. The odd voice fluctuations and emphasis on just about every other work has become synonymous with the name Christopher Walken. I do not even think he was trying to really act in this movie. He kept all the mannerisms that have made him famous and simply put on a costume and waited for the camera to roll.

How many times can Randy get hit in the “family jewels” before it gets old? The answer, in this case, is only once. After that you can tell when it is coming. It gets old really fast and does nothing to make the movie any funnier. Granted, the same was done in “Dodgeball,” but it was a much funnier crutch to lean on and was a part of the plot. In “Balls of Fury” it is just overkill.

This movie is so boring, so unoriginal and so unfunny that it comes off as a pathetic attempt at entertainment. The only thing it does is waste time and makes this review that much harder to write.

5/10
Rated PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor, and for language.
90 mins